Author's Note: Thank you BotheredOne7 and Adsy for your reviews and alerts/favorites, thank you LovelyEndingsAndLateStarts and Okinawa Angel for putting me on your alerts! I had kind of hoped this chapter would come out on my birthday, and then hoped it would come out on New Year's Eve, but I had some trouble with it. Sorry? Although I think I can partially blame the fact that the only people who reviewed were the people I asked to, and more people read this story on the day that last chapter came out than I've ever had view on a day... if this isn't good enough to review you could at least flame me!
Okay, pity party moment over. On with the chapter!
"Why do you think everyone hates you?" The other girl asked, and her voice sounded closer. Kurania didn't look, although she wondered why the stall door hadn't creaked. Instead she focused on an odd little shape on the side of the sink's faucet, suddenly ashamed to have spoken like that out loud.
"I - there's no reason, I'm just being silly. Sorry to bother you." Kurania said, and turned around to hurry out of the bathroom.
Her shoulder suddenly felt as if it'd had a bucket of water poured on it, and Kurania stopped and turned to look. A see-through hand sat on - and partially in - her shoulder. "Come now, there's got to be some kind of -"
Kurania squawked and leapt away. "G-ghost!" She gasped, staring. The other girl was floating a little in midair, and Kurania could see a stall on the other side. The ghostly girl wore the usual Hogwarts uniform and had dark hair in pigtails, with circular old-fashioned glasses. The look on her face was pained, and Kurania immediately apologized. "I'm so sorry! I just... I haven't really seen a ghost up close before, I didn't mean to insult you!"
The other girl studied Kurania for a moment. "You didn't mean to insult me?" She repeated after a long pause, and her eyes filled with shining tears. Kurania took a couple of steps forward and held her hand right above a ghostly shoulder.
"I'm really sorry - I didn't mean to be insensitive." The best reason Kurania could come up with for the dark-haired ghost's tears was that she tried to forget she was dead most of the time and it was a painful reminder. "Please don't cry." She begged. "Forget I said anything."
"Don't cry? Quit pretending to care! Nobody cared if I cried when I was alive, and nobody cares now I'm dead!" The ghost howled, tears pouring out of her eyes. She turned away and flew through a stall door. "Nobody ever cares about poor, miserable, moping Myrtle! So just go away! Leave me alone..."
Kurania stared after her, completely shocked. For a moment, she thought about doing as Myrtle asked, but on the word 'alone', Myrtle's voice had cracked and Kurania was quite sure that leaving now was the wrong thing to do. So, she walked over to Myrtle's stall and said gently, "You don't really want to be alone here, do you?"
"It doesn't matter what I want! Nobody ever comes to see me unless they want something. Then they'll promise to come back and they never do!"
"I don't want anything from you," Kurania told her. "except for you to forgive me for upsetting you. I'll come every day, if you want me to!"
"Ha!" Myrtle snorted. "You say that, but you won't."
"I really will!"
"Then prove it! Come back to visit tomorrow." Myrtle snapped. "But don't think I'll forgive you, because I know you're just agreeing to come back so that you can hurt me even more!"
"I don't want to hurt you." Kurania reassured her. "And I will see you tomorrow, okay?" Myrtle made an irritable noise, and Kurania took it as assent and left. About two hallways further, she met up with the Slytherin girls who seemed to be looking for her. They were a little annoyed that she had ran off to the bathroom, and Lyra again reminded her about Pluto's advice, but they let it go soon enough. Lunch was very tasty, and Kurania made sure not to grab something that would leave crumbs all over her. As the Slytherins headed out of the Great Hall, Gabriel asked her, "Why were you late?"
"I... had to use the restroom." She said uncomfortably. It didn't feel right at all to say such a thing to a boy.
"Not Myrtle's?" He asked, sounding oddly sympathetic. Kurania wondered where he'd heard about her from, seeing as he was a boy, but many of the Slytherin students seemed to have lots of relatives to share Hogwart's secrets with them.
"Is she always in there?" Kurania asked, disregarding his tone of voice, thinking that he was sick or something.
"Well, yeah. Nobody else ever goes in there because of her. Bad luck to meet her your first day." Gabriel sighed, patting her on the back.
Kurania stopped walking, and the others stopped with her. They were right next to the doors. "What do you mean, nobody goes in there? And why would it be bad luck?"
"Well, she's awful, isn't she? Hollering at everyone, making fun of people, flooding her bathroom all the time." Denise sniffed.
Kurania scowled. "She was perfectly nice to me, and I wish you wouldn't talk like that about her when you haven't even met her."
"What do you mean, she was nice to you? My sister says that she's rude to everyone!" Roderick argued.
"She was very nice when I was crying!" Kurania insisted, wincing once she'd realized what she had said. She didn't like to be thought of as a weak person, and tears were a definite sign of weakness.
"You were crying?" A worried voice asked. Roderick, Gabriel and the other three boys quickly pulled out their wands, and Kurania spun around to glare at Hidan.
"It's none of your business!" She snapped. "Shoo!" You're such a moron, she told him mentally. You were there when Teddy insulted me and you didn't say a thing.
"Kurania..." He mumbled, looking hurt. And then Aoife O'Connell, the girl that had tried to save Hidan in the lake, appeared on the scene.
She looked absolutely furious. "How dare you talk to Hidan like that?" O'Connell spat at Kurania, her frizzy black hair crackling around her head like a storm.
The look on Hidan's face was absolutely priceless, and only became worse as Christine decided to pitch in. "She dares to talk to him like that because they grew up together. She's got much more of a right to talk to this albino than you do, seeing as you didn't even know." Kurania gave her a look at the 'albino' part, but had to let it go because O'Connell began sputtering.
"Let's get to class, we've got Herbology." A first-year Slytherin boy whose name Kurania did not know spoke up. On the way to the greenhouse, he introduced himself as Philip Langely and the other boys as Orion Smith and Casey Madison. Kurania could've smacked herself for forgetting Orion; he was Lyra's twin, after all, and had introduced himself when he asked Pluto a question. The grounds at Hogwarts were very interesting, and as the Slytherins approached the greenhouses the wind brought voices from the direction of a rather depressing-looking forest. Kurania couldn't make out the exact words, but it sounded like English to her. She wondered if she'd have time to look around there later, because she could've sworn the voices were discussing hunting, and she didn't think that was legal so close to a school.
The first time Kurania had met Professor Longbottom, he'd scared her. Admittedly, she'd been doing something rather cruel and stupid but nonetheless, she hadn't anticipated how different he would be as a teacher. Before, he had been very serious and hadn't smiled much at all. In class, though, he never seemed to stop smiling, and made several jokes. He didn't treat Slytherins any worse than Ravenclaws, and gave Kurania five points for helping with a demonstration. Kurania would have declared it her favorite class if she hadn't gotten poop in her hair - and not just any poop, dragon poop. Why such a thing was used as fertilizer, Kurania didn't want to know. She just wanted to be clean. After she'd gotten her shower, she worked on her homework with Lyra and Orion. She went to bed rather early that day, hoping that her other teachers would be like Professor Longbottom (but without any dragon poop in their classrooms).
Unfortunately, fate seemed to be out to get her. The Transfiguration teacher, Professor Karlin, was a rude woman that seemed to hate Slytherins, and although she did not single Kurania out for punishment, she continually gave her a look as if she was trying to decipher her. It made Kurania highly uncomfortable, and she was happy to escape her classroom. However, History proved to be far worse; Hidan had told her that the teacher that grabbed her when she got her schedule was the History professor, and had promised that she had the class with Gryffindors. Kurania should have been able to guess how the class was going to go, but as usual, Hidan's words slipped her mind nearly as quickly as he'd said them. This time though, she regretted ignoring him.
Professor Kolberts gave out three detentions in the first five minutes of class - to Christine, for wearing makeup; to Roderick, for having dirt on his nose; and to Kurania, for failure to reply to attendance. By the end of class, Denise was the only Slytherin who did not have detention for one unreasonable reason or another, and Kurania had two week's worth. Philip Langely was sent to Professor McGonagall for calling Kolberts a squib, and though Kurania didn't know what that was she hoped it meant something awful. A few minutes after leaving the room, she and Christine burst into tears and ran for a bathroom. Once they'd calmed down, Kurania talked her into visiting Myrtle.
Christine didn't like the look of the bathroom, that much was obvious. She deigned to wait outside rather than, as she put it, "Risk life-threatening illness by breathing in that awful mold!" Myrtle was surprised to see Kurania, but she refused to forgive her or talk politely. Kurania would have tried to stay there until Myrtle would listen to her apology properly, but Christine's scream from behind the door stopped her short. Kurania hurried out the door, and was hit by a beam of red light almost instantly.
Two hours later the effects of the third year Gryffindor's hex had faded completely, but Pluto's anger hadn't. "I told you all to stay in a group!" He told all five Slytherin girls. "I meant you all had to stay together, not divide up into groups of two and three! What would have happened if I hadn't came by when I did? Christine and Kurania might have been seriously injured! If there had been five of you, he might not even have attacked!" All the girls could do was look at their feet and hope he'd get sick of lecturing soon enough. However, Plue intended to be a teacher some day and seemed more than happy to talk for hours at a stretch, and although it got quite repetitive, Kurania thought that most teachers repeated themselves a lot too. All in all, he seemed quite prepared for the job and Kurania told him so. That led to a lecture on brown nosing, which was cut short when the Hospital Wing's matron came over and threw them all out.
Later that evening, when Denise explained had explained everything to Charon and he had translated for the others, Kurania had to put up with another lecture. This one was about putting up with stupid people rather than sicking her three lovely poisonous snakes on them, and she had to explain to them once again why killing was wrong. Overall she was quite frustrated by bedtime and had a rather hard time sleeping. The dreams she had that night weren't quite as odd as her normal ones, but they all featured a large black shadow stretching far behind her, regardless of where the lighting was.
The next day had one good part to it: Defense Against the Dark Arts. The teacher, Veronica Hansen, was a cheerful young woman that was quick to insist that everyone call her by her first name. She was perhaps a little more cold towards the Slytherins, but still awarded points fairly and helped everyone with their first DADA assignment. The assignment was the part Kurania enjoyed; in a way, it was mindblowing. She had heard of Dodo birds, but had thought they were extinct, and yet she was being asked to catch one. Apparently they were actually Diricrawls, and could teleport. The teacher had hexed the room so that the Diricrawls would not be able to teleport out, but it was still nearly impossible to get ahold of one. At the end of class, the only people who had successfully caught one were Kurania and a Hufflepuff boy named Edmund. They each recieved ten points, and seven or so others who had nearly managed to catch a Diricrawl recieved five. Kurania ended up staying after for a few minutes to ask about other magical creatures, which completely surprised the teacher.
"You're Muggleborn?" She asked her, and then hurried to say, "I mean, I have nothing against that of course, but, what with being in Slytherin and all, it's quite unexpected..." Veronica answered some of her questions, but shooed her out soon enough with a book titled 'Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them'.
That evening yielded many surprises. Because she had been hexed the day before, and had spent part of the day in the Hospital Wing, her detentions with Kolberts had been set to start that night. However, an anonymous student (Hidan, no doubt) had reminded Headmistress McGonagall that Kolberts had harrassed Kurania on the first day of school and so she was assigned to help another teacher, a Professor Hagrid, instead. He taught Care of Magical Creatures, a class that could only be taken by third years and above, so Kurania had expected him to be a completely unfamiliar person. However, Professor Hagrid turned out to be the gigantuan and hairy person that had accompanied the first years across the lake.
End Notes: I was tempted to write out Kurania's full detention here, but the next chapter needs some padding and it'll work better there anyway. Any guesses at how things'll go? And has anyone figured out the halloween surprise yet? I looked back, and I just about stated it outright! I mean, not specifically but I made it easy to guess... there's some long-term foreshadowing in this chapter too. Sorry that all the teachers hate Kurania, but that's kind of important. In the books we see that the Wizarding world is very fickle as a whole, and I just couldn't see them letting Slytherins go back to normal after what happened. I know that Slytherins were still respectable after the first time Voldemort fell, but he didn't make it to Hogwarts that time - the second time would be much more personal for the teachers.
Thank you for reading this chapter of KatSL! I really hope you'll review me your opinions and any corrections that you might have, I really don't care if you're not logged in or you don't have much to say. I'd prefer a lengthy review, but even a short one makes me know that people are actually reading through the whole story!
